Remembering Public Events: Exploring Agenda-Setting Effect on Collective Memory Among Young People in China

• In Event: Advances in Agenda Setting Research

Abstract

Past scholarship confirmed that public events that happened in the critical age were mostly likely to be carried forward in people’s memory. However, it is unclear why some of the public events happened in the critical period entered into people’s memories while other events did not. The current study integrates the insights from memory studies and agenda setting theory to explore 1) the extent young people share their memories of pubic events which are either ongoing or happened recently, 2) what characteristics of events and individuals count for the remembering, and 3) the role of news media in the formation of collective memory in the context of China. It reveals that the sharedness of youth’s memories of public events is limited, factors including Communist Party membership, level of news attention, perceived issue seriousness, online and offline political discussion affect the number of events recalled from memory. Lastly, it also confirms the memory-setting effect of market oriented media and news website and fails to find a strong correlation between party media agenda and collective memory agenda.

Authors

• Shuning Lu, University of Texas at Austin

• Baohua Zhou, Fudan U